School run by large academy trust threatened with closure. Down the road, new free school, run by same trust, recently opened

Collective Spirit free school, Oldham, which closed in 2017, with some former pupils heading to Oasis Academy Oldham

Covering English education reform is often surreal. Perhaps this is a polite word for how desperately chaotic recent attempts to organise schools must look from a town such as Oldham.

Last Friday, a page on the Department for Education's website revealed that one of Oldham’s large secondary schools, Oasis Academy Oldham, had had a “minded to terminate” letter published by the Department for Education.

This saw the school, run by one of England’s largest academy chains, threatened with having its funding withdrawn, following the second Ofsted-inadequate judgement it has received since it opened in 2010.

As of January last year, the school had 1,441 pupils on its books, meaning it was almost at its capacity of 1,500. So this is quite an uncertain time for them.

The letter to “the members and trustees of Oasis” saw Vicky Beer, the regional schools commissioner, saying she needed to see “rapid and sustained improvement” at the school if the firmer “termination warning notice” were not to be avoided.*

However, not far away, Oasis got the green light from Beer’s bosses at the Department for Education less than two years ago to open another secondary school, under the free schools programme.

A report in the Manchester Evening News in 2017 said that at this time, the new school had been lined up to open on the site of another school which had closed in 2010.

But that would have made it the second free school project proposed to open on this site, after plans for another free, called Phoenix, where pupils “would have been taught by former military personnel” foundered.

The MEN story says that “the government pulled the plug on Phoenix [in 2014] after fearing it ‘would  not be able to meet the rigorous criteria set for free schools’, although this might have been putting it politely: in 2013 I observed that claims on its website sounded “more like the musings of a rightwing newspaper editorial column than a school prospectus”.

The new Oasis free school actually opened, though, on another site – only two miles away from Oasis Academy Oldham - last September.

It is called Oasis Academy Leesbrook. This is a change of name from “Oasis Academy Oldham 2”, under which this school was approved to open, back in April 2017. Like Oasis Academy Oldham, it has capacity for 1,500 pupils.

Given Oasis Academy Oldham’s travails, perhaps it is understandable that the trust decided to change the name.

After Oasis Academy Oldham’s second Ofsted-inadequate report, following an inspection in November, the trust has told parents that it would “leave no stone unturned” in addressing the issues raised, and there was some praise by inspectors for the current management team’s turnaround efforts.

But the upshot is that one secondary free school has opened in this town, just months before another secondary school run by the same trust is threatened with closure for poor performance.

Oasis Academy Oldham, by the way, had been one of the schools charged with taking on pupils who would otherwise have been left with nowhere to go following the chaotic failure, and closure, of another free school in the town in 2017: Collective Spirit.

How do pupils who have already changed schools in these circumstances feel about this letter threatening their new one’s future, you wonder.

Also in 2017, the town saw the closure of another institution launched under the coalition government, as the £9m Greater Manchester Sustainable Engineering University Technical College closed its doors.

Oldham was also caught up in the controversy surrounding the Bright Tribe academy chain, having a primary school within that now-closing trust.

Close observers of this scene wonder what schools reform has planned for the town next; how pupils and parents can have a better sense of security in terms of the future of education institutions; and whether anyone will get a grip on the town’s needs.

Was predecessor school really failing?

News that a school within the Inspiration Trust (IT) chain had failed an Ofsted inspection, as first reported on this website, provoked the usual flurry of reactions and contacts from various interested observers.

One points out that information published in the trust’s annual accounts in January states that the school which this academy replaced was Ofsted-rated inadequate at the time.

But this appears to be incorrect.

On page nine of the accounts, it is stated that Great Yarmouth Primary Academy (GYPA) was Ofsted-inadequate “pre-trust”. It opened under the IT in September 2012.

However, in fact the local Norwich Evening News had reported, in December 2011 that the school which GYPA replaced – Greenacre primary and nursery school - had thrown off its previous special measures verdict, following an inspection in November 2011. The piece appeared under the headline “Ofsted praise for bounce-back Great Yarmouth primary”.

The 2011 Ofsted report on Greenacre seems unavailable publicly, to cross-check this. Happily, however, I have school-by-school data from the inspectorate from that time. This reveals that Greenacre had indeed received a non-inadequate verdict following a visit on November 2^nd and 3^rd, 2011: it was rated “requires improvement” overall, with behaviour, quality of teaching and quality of leadership all rated good.

This means that Great Yarmouth primary academy, which was rated inadequate for all those three sub-categories above as well as overall following its latest inspection last November, has now fallen back in Ofsted terms since its academisation under the IT, despite two “good” Ofsted verdicts in 2014.

Rachel de Souza, the IT’s chief executive, described the latest Ofsted verdict on the school on local radio last week as “wrong, wrong, wrong”. But should the record in the accounts, which do flag up some more successful recent Ofsted verdicts for some of the trust’s other schools, not be corrected?

Especially, wonders a source, when the accuracy of Ofsted’s inspection verdict had been challenged so vigorously by the IT?

I have asked the trust for a response.

-By the way, I note that the Inspiration Trust’s accounts state that payments to “key management personnel” shot up by some 21 per cent last year, increasing by £384,124 from £1,792,415 to £2,176,539.

The trust’s “senior management team,” who are stated in the accounts as receiving this remuneration, are listed within them as comprising five central leaders and the principals of each school.

With the trust having 13 schools, that works out at more than £100,000 in 2017-18, on average, for each of these 18 leaders. Even with these figures including employer’s national insurance and pensions payments, this seems at face value hard to square with disclosures elsewhere in the accounts that there were only 12 people in the organisation paid £70,000 or more in 2017-18.

In any case, the £2.2m figure seems a large jump in the outlay on central management, at a time when the trust had grown only from 12 schools to 13 (one extra principal, at that one school, Great Yarmouth Charter Academy, would not account for that £384k jump). Heavy outlay on the trust’s curriculum work, which was cited in its response to the GYPA Ofsted report last week, is thought to be contributing.

But is it delivering?

UPDATE: (Friday, March 8^th). The Inspiration Trust has got back to say: “Our 2017-18 accounts inadvertently listed the pre-trust inspection rating for Great Yarmouth primary academy as inadequate, when it should have read satisfactory. The accounts cannot now be amended, but we will ensure that the correct rating is reflected in any future documentation.”

The trust also pointed out that my piece above should have stated that Greenacre was rated “satisfactory” in 2011, rather than “requires improvement”, as I stated. The “requires improvement” rating was not introduced until 2012, when it replaced “satisfactory”, it pointed out.

(I had access only to the 2011 inspection’s numerical judgement of “3” on this school, because there was no predecessor school report available on Ofsted’s website, so I had assumed that this meant “requires improvement,” as it does now, rather than “satisfactory”. I am happy to correct the record on this.)

*The letter came less than 18 months after Beer was quoted in the Oldham Chronicle praising the school’s “increasing profile of the school within the local community and the sense of pride of all those involved”.